WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 699: The Sword of Coincidence

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Clouds gathered overhead again. The faint sunlight that had been filtering through vanished without a trace.

The outer edge of the Zaun settlement dropped off into a cliff, and behind it stood a sheer rock face like a wall.

On a clear day it would have been breathtaking. Under this dark and overcast sky, the landscape looked like a fragment torn from someone's nightmare.

Against that backdrop, Enkrid stood with sword in hand, watching Heskal.

Heskal had taken an unusual stance: a gauntlet fitted with a small shield extended in front, the sword in his right hand raised behind the shield as if concealed there.

Do not leave chance as chance.

Why had that thought come to him?

It had started with a question that formed while listening to the Boatman speak. The Boatman always talked about what was to come.

Does the Boatman know the future?

Some of what he had shown came true in reality. Some did not.

No one can fix the future. Speak of what is to come, and the present changes. That is the prophet's dilemma.

Say nothing and there is nothing to prove. Write it down and read it only after events unfold, and that is not prophecy but record-keeping.

Open your mouth and speak, does it become prophecy? Those who hear a prophecy know the future, so they act against it. The future shifts, and the prophecy fails.

The Boatman could not escape that dilemma either.

The Boatman does not know the future.

And yet he spoke as though he were watching it. How?

Put on a mask and you hide your face, and you can pass yourself off as someone else.

A masquerade is enjoyable precisely because no one knows the face behind the mask.

So a masquerade fills with people dressed in their finest. Some appear in forms no one could have imagined of them before.

The Boatman was not seeing the future. He was dressed to look as though he was. He swapped masks as the need arose.

What if he simply read each situation and spoke to fit it?

That was leaving nothing to chance.

That was Enkrid's read of it.

Still, narrow vision made it impossible. Wide vision was essential.

You have to understand what is happening around you to turn chance into intent.

The thought carved its own path and connected, unexpectedly, to the swordwork he was now exploring. Ideas tangled like cobwebs, all running toward a single conclusion.

Why had he fixed the instinct-sword into the form of a counter?

Because it was natural. There had been no other path. So that was what he had done.

But why, exactly?

He needed a clearer answer. He needed to examine the process more carefully.

He asked himself again and again and worked through it. He had to find the reason. A genius might do it naturally without understanding why, but Enkrid was no genius.

So he had to know it piece by piece.

Doing something without understanding it and doing it with full understanding were as far apart as heaven and earth. At least for him.

The answer came without much trouble. He had spent days thinking it through, so in a way the answer was already there.

He had to receive the situation first, then react. That was why the form was always counter. That was the reason.

The sword of chance.

It was the third sword art, after Breaker and Flash.

Same as before.

Once the meaning, the method of execution, and the method of training were established, it could become a sword art in its own right.

Did it come easier this time, having done it twice before?

Not a chance. Creating a sword art was like opening a new world.

Even so, the goddess of fortune had come today. Was this pure luck, then? No. Intent.

Even that fortune, I draw into my own intent.

That was what the sword art meant. Stated plainly:

Making it appear as though all luck flows toward me.

The method of execution was to use everything that happened by chance. The method of training was to fight hundreds and thousands of times, accumulating varied experience until the body knew how to respond in any situation.

But is experience alone truly the answer?

A small doubt surfaced. That was probably where the sword art still had room to grow. Not something to sort out right now.

Learning through experience was something Enkrid had done countless times already. The training method had already been built into his body. All that remained was to establish the execution and the form.

Enkrid used the chance that was Heskal to do exactly that.

Without warning, Heskal thrust the shield in his left hand straight forward and blocked Enkrid's line of sight. At the same moment he leaked the impression that his body was shifting left.

Enkrid's sword snapped out on reflex. The Three-Iron's blade traced a short arc and struck the shield. Pushing it back entirely was not easy. Heskal was as strong as a giant, and beyond that, his technique was extraordinary.

Clang!

The moment his blade hit the shield, Enkrid felt the force flowing off in one direction. The shield deflected the energy in his blow.

Heskal had sold the feint, making it seem as though he had stepped left. He appeared on the right.

Thrust the shield forward to blind the eyes, fake a step left, and drive the sword in from the right.

The movement was simple. The tactic even simpler. What made it lethal was the sharp, brilliant presence of mind that had forced the situation here, and the technical precision to rattle even Enkrid's senses.

By Heskal's frame of reference the Three-Iron had been pushed left, and by Enkrid's it had gone right. Either way, the return path was too long. Pulling the blade back to block would have been difficult. It was, by any measure, an opening.

The blade came in. And Enkrid, as though he had been waiting for exactly this moment, pulled his sword back and struck the tip of Heskal's thrusting blade with his pommel.

If the blade could not return in time, block with something else.

Crack!

The hit was precise enough that it did not miss, and the impact rang out loud.

"Were you trying to damage my tip?"

Heskal stepped back as he said it.

Enkrid opened and closed the hand buzzing from the shock and answered.

"An inscribed weapon's edge won't chip that easily."

"Did you intend that?"

A question, with no pause for breath. Enkrid nodded.

All chance also into intent.

Of course he had not intended it. He had been caught off guard.

So that is the fang.

The fang Heskal had kept hidden was lethal.

A sword of deception.

That was the fang. He put calculation and pressure at the front, forced the opponent into a corner, and killed with a single act of misdirection.

The winner lives. The loser dies. That is the world of those who carry swords. Heskal was strong. There was no question.

And though Enkrid had not planned it, the sword of chance he had just shown was Heskal's perfect counter.

Heskal used deception to hunt for openings, and the sword of chance turned even those openings into intent.

Not that anyone could do it.

At minimum it takes someone who has fought thousands of times over, and this man just did it like it was nothing.

Heskal's eye for these things was sharp. He had grasped, to some degree, what Enkrid had just done.

That was the thought it left him with.

Only an enormous accumulation of experience made something like that possible.

Turning chance into intent, you say? Easy to say. But without countless real fights, having been cut and stabbed more times than anyone could count, it could not be done.

A hundred years of relentlessly seeking out fitting opponents and fighting them, perhaps that was what it would take.

"Remarkable talent," Heskal murmured.

Enkrid let his sword hang, steadied his breathing, and half-closed his eyes.

Something had flashed through his mind while he worked through the sword art and sparred.

It was a sudden connection, like slotting pieces into place. The sword art he had been puzzling over had touched the current situation directly, and a knot came loose on its own.

He traced back through everything that had happened up to now.

He looked at the tangled situation simply, then looked at it untangled. There was nothing difficult about it. Watching from outside sometimes made things clearer.

What if it was intent disguised as chance?

One assumption became possible.

What if targeting Ann was not intentional?

Why go after Ann? Why stall for time? Was Ann a threat? How did they know Ann and choose to target her?

What if the one who stalled and the one who went for Ann were different people?

Not every question had an answer.

But a few of them seemed close.

They saw Ann by accident. But it was a face they recognized, and they decided she was in the way. So they tried to kill her and failed.

The hostility was clear. But calling it tenacious would be wrong.

A throw of the dice, nothing more.

That was the answer he had arrived at.

"Were you watching?"

In the middle of all this, Heskal spoke. Not to Enkrid.

"It has been some time since I saw that kind of focus in someone swinging a blade."

The family head. He was standing quietly beside Anahehra and had said it to him.

"I suppose. It was enjoyable. Enkrid of the Border Guard."

Heskal exchanged a few words with the family head, who had been watching from the side, and tipped his head toward Enkrid.

Enkrid had learned much from him. He nodded back. A thank you.

There had been much to learn here.

"Your body?"

Heskal asked the family head again.

"Put your worries away. I know my own body."

Heskal worried about the family head's condition, and the family head held to the same detached manner as always.

That was all. The family head left, and Anahehra declared herself next and charged in.

She was at junior knight level, but her strength alone was a match for a full knight.

Giants were a race that could beat hundreds of humans to death without effort.

The name red-blooded Demon Creature had not attached to them without reason. By nature, their boiling fighting spirit should have driven her to cause constant trouble, the kind involving beating people half to death or worse. But she had adapted to Zaun.

When he asked her why:

"Because it's fun."

Not all humans are the same, and not all elves or Frogs are the same. Giants were no different. Curiosity and the drive to improve were what had let her overcome the fighting instinct running in her blood.

"I'm going to become a knight," Anahehra declared.

"It won't be easy," Enkrid said, and left a lump on her head. He had struck with the flat of the blade. If he had cut with the true silver or hardest iron side, the Zaun family would have lost their giant beauty.

"That's exactly why it's fun. I want to fight better. I want to fight stronger people too."

Fighting spirit and the will to improve, joined together.

He also understood why she could say it like that. Sparring and living among the Zaun family had let him understand more clearly than what he had learned from Grida, Magroon, and Odinkar back at the Border Guard.

Part of it was that the people here did not bother to hide anything. Part of it was that Enkrid was currently opening a new world, and his field of vision had broadened because of it.

The Zaun family operated on one underlying premise.

No single category can contain everyone.

Respect individual character and help each person achieve what they want. Teach, spar, share training methods, share techniques.

A system built for the gifted.

That was the swordsmanship Zaun pursued.

And Enkrid was in the process of establishing a system for those without gifts.

The path goes elsewhere.

In terms of this place's system specifically, you could say he had learned everything there was to learn. Their techniques, their training methods, all of it assumed a person of talent as the baseline.

That was the core of it.

Know the core, and the smaller techniques and training approaches followed from reason.

This path is not mine.

Of course talent remained the standard. But,

Those who fall short of it also have to be able to rise.

That was where swordsmanship needed to go. By Enkrid's measure, it did.

He had beaten Anahehra as well, and no one was shouting about how he had proudly knocked Zaun down, but quietly, everyone had acknowledged Enkrid's ability.

Heskal had been watching from the side. He came over and asked.

"What do you make of Zaun?"

"It's good."

Heskal was old. His full mastery of Will across his entire body placed him at the level of a senior knight, and that masked it, but the age was there.

His physical strength and reflexes were past the point where decline had set in.

Becoming a knight did not mean you could hold back time.

Slow, but aging.

Everyone had a season when their peak held.

A knight's peak lasted long. Even deep into old age, strength did not fade easily.

But it was not forever.

Heskal seemed older than Enkrid had initially guessed. And yet he was still moving between the surrounding villages with energy, living fully. A man who would do anything for Zaun, everyone said so.

"Right. It is a good place. But doesn't the family head's attitude bother you?"

"You mean that he rarely spars with anyone directly?"

"Not that."

Enkrid could not tell why Heskal was saying this to him right now.

They had grown comfortable enough for casual speech, and this was how he started, talking behind the family head's back? Or was there more to it?

"Zaun has a system for sharpening skill, but no system for resisting outside pressure. That falls to the family head, and he does nothing about it."

"Is that something you need?"

"You came from the Border Guard, so you should know better than most. Did you stay just because you wanted to, and stagnate just because you could? Zaun's strength is considerable. You're not unaware of why Schmidt keeps pushing for them to come under imperial territory, are you?"

They had crossed swords and talked. Heskal knew the man in front of him was not dim.

What Heskal said was not unlike talk that had come out of the Naurillia Kingdom once, some time ago.

Right after the Madman Knights were founded.

The claim was that the Border Guard had grown too powerful. Scatter the Madman Knights, or send them to the front line, people had argued.

There had been a push to bring them into the kingdom as a royal order, following the Red Cloak Knights.

Enkrid had heard about it later.

Every time that kind of talk surfaced, Crang cut it down at once.

"Has anyone wiped the sweat from Sir Enkrid's brow while he trained? Then how can you demand his loyalty to the crown?"

That was what he had reportedly said to the nobles.

A period when some of the nobility thought the Madman Knights were not yet quite mad enough.

Of course, anyone who faced them directly quickly dropped that opinion.

Regardless, Heskal's point was clear.

"Zaun has to change. Before a bigger wave comes, it has to change somehow. If rain is coming, don't you find shelter before it arrives?"

Not everyone agreed with Heskal exactly.

"Zaun has strength. Yes, strength. So build an independent defense system. Better if the approach is a bit aggressive. Bring in the gifted from outside, that's what I mean. The Empire watched us bring talented children in and train them and then copied the practice. So why shouldn't we look at the Empire and do the same? The Empire draws in the talented from across the continent and spares no effort training its armies. We should be more proactive about it too."

This was the opinion of Lynox. His words were a little unorganized, but that was because he had lived a life where the blade came before speech.

Heskal was the better talker, there was no question.

The family head had listened to both their views and said nothing, as always. Only a quiet nod.

His thinking remained unknown.

Alexandra, watching those two, had said only:

"They both love Zaun. As do I."

Enkrid looked up at the sky, thick with dark clouds. Watching it, he thought it a strange match for the situation around him.

"It looks like a storm is coming soon."

Just as Alexandra had once said.

The quiet that comes right before a storm seemed to have settled over Zaun.

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